River Flow Monitoring

What we doIETG offer a range of services to provide accurate data on flow in rivers, streams and other channels.

River flow monitoring often involves the use of equipment across a cross-section of water. These measure flow depth and velocity through the water column. Measurements are taken to analyse the relationship between depth and flow area. Cross-sections are chosen carefully to avoid re-circulations and moving river beds.

How we do itIf you fail to plan, you're planning to fail

On river monitoring, while our Planning and Scheduling department are involved prior to starting on site, pre-survey inspections become even more important.

Our Field Crews have a wealth of experience of monitoring and equipment and will help clients select the best sites available, taking into account available structures, flow conditions (at the time and considering spate conditions), and access during a variety of weather conditions.

Time put into preparation is a key contributor to getting successful results

Even the best equipment needs to be installed correctly to record accurately.

The experience of our Field Crews is second-to-none, and leads to quality installations even in difficult circumstances. They have to account for potentially changing bed levels, siltation and standing pools, etc. They also need to consider what will happen in different weather/river conditions.

This is supported by Field Managers monitoring all installations as part of our quality control procedures in order to ensure the data recorded and presented is of the highest possible quality.

Once installed, equipment sends back data on a daily basis. Our Data Analysts visually inspect the data from every monitor, every day. This means that any problems can be identified quickly, and Field Crews scheduled for maintenance visits as necessary.

Data analysts inspect each monitor’s data on a daily basis, to identify problems and ensure that maintenance visits can be arranged in a timely manner to prevent data loss. This inspection of data can provide additional benefits: on several occasions our Data Analysts have identified problems on the sewerage network from data patterns and have been able to alert the Operators in time to prevent pollution incidents.

Historically, we have been asked questions about monitor performance and balancing issues months (and sometimes years!) after our report has been completed. These queries can be difficult to resolve at a distance, are time-consuming, and can delay the modeling process significantly. For this reason, we conduct data reviews with the modeling team in the first few weeks of the survey in order to ensure they understand what is happening at each site, to optimise the quality of data and to investigate any flow balancing anomalies.

Service that goes beyond just sending the data out, saving time and highlighting issues

At IETG, we have the largest fleet of dual-sensor, telemetry flow monitors in the UK, ensuring we can provide clear and accurate data continuously in the vast majority of cases.

Telemetry allows us to check data quality and often, while minimising the number of Confined Space entries our teams have to undertake.

Dual-sensor technology gives us a series of checks on data between the sensors and a “back-up” from the secondary sensors if necessary, minimising data loss and making maintenance visits as efficient as possible.

Our aim, always, is to use the best available technology at each site. So, on the rare occasion that our existing fleet isn’t suitable at a particular site, where possible we’ll find something that is.